Arcadia (15 page)

Em slept. She was so tired, and dreaming too. The noise and smoke, they said, must have been the scenery of dreams, so that they did not threaten her or make her wake. The smoke – they
said, they said – would have sunk into her room from the attic and curled up where she lay and hugged her tight and dry before the flames came down the stairs. They said she would have
dreamed her death and felt no pain. But who can tell? Perhaps the truth is this, Em woke. Who would not wake when there was so much noise and anarchy, when the timbers cracked and grumbled like
Epimenides the Slumberer who woke, stiff and dry and fiery, from two hundred years of sleep? Her eyes were smarting; from dreams, she thought at first. But then the smell, the boiling vapours of
the house, the smoke, the drumming hubbub of the flames, made confusions of that kind short-lived. She would have called at once for Victor, and gone down on her hands and knees to scrabble for him
where she thought he slept. How long was it before she realized that he was safe? Or thought that he was dead? Or took the chance to save herself and all the rest be damned?

The smoke by then was far too thick and acrid for Em to see the window light, suffused by shadow and by whitewash even when there was no fire. She could only guess where the door was. Perhaps
she found the wall and felt along it for the architraves. And then, empowered by some ancient sense of flight, found easy passage through her neighbours’ rooms into the hotter, fresh-brewed
smoke which furnaced from the few remaining timbers in the flaming, disappearing stairwell. Did she die there, gasping, gaping like a fish on land for moist and icy oxygen and finding only pungent,
scalding gas? Or did she simply curl up to drown beneath the fervent, swirling blanket of smoke in her own room, her husband’s unlit candle melting in her hand, her family’s spilt and
puddled urine holding back the flames for just a trice, because she did not wish to live without her son? These are the questions everybody asked – and answered – for a day or two. But
no one volunteered the truth, or called the owner in for questioning, or wondered why Princesses should play with fire at dawn. And no one asked, of course, how it could be that sixty-seven people
slept in this four-storey house that had been built for ten. Or how they lived with just three taps and no gaslight and just two toilets in the yard. Or where the singed and heated dispossessed had
found themselves new ‘homes’. Or why it was that no one came to name or claim the single blackened corpse.

Aunt should not take any blame. She and her nephew were moved away by policemen with the others in the crowd. The policemen did not care if those they moved were gawpers from the neighbourhood
or residents. ‘Move on, move on,’ was all they understood, as if the drama of the streets was a private spectacle, cordoned off to everyone except those few who wore the ticket of a
uniform. There were no firemen there or fire appliances. In neighbourhoods like that all epidemics, rioting and fires were left to run their course. The buildings, bodies, laws were not worth
keeping thereabouts, it was thought. In fact, a city councillor had said the week before that the best prospect for the city was for all the tenements to be consumed by flames, for all the lawless
poor to be dispersed by heat like rodents in a forest fire, for the squalid quarters of the city to be fumigated, cauterized. ‘Let’s build again. From scratch,’ he’d
said.

Aunt and Victor were driven back along the street towards the bakery. Victor was crying from the shock and drama of the fire. He wanted Em. He wanted Mother now. He would not walk a pace, so
Aunt was forced to lift him on her shoulders until the policemen judged that they had driven back the crowd to a safe and sterile distance. They turned and watched the smoke knit grey scarves above
the roofs, with flecks of dying orange made by airborne sparks. Aunt asked those Princesses she recognized if they’d seen Em. They thought they had. They weren’t sure. Yes, yes,
they’d seen her standing in the street eating bread with Aunt and Victor just a while ago. Or no, they hadn’t seen her, not for days. Em who? They didn’t know her by a name.

Aunt did not panic. She was sure that Em was safe. She’d heard it said the building had been cleared. In any case, the fire had started in the attic rooms, and all the attic girls seemed
well enough if not exactly dressed for shopping or a ball. Em would have had more chance than them to wake, to dress, to come downstairs, to go in search of her sister and her son. What could Aunt
do except stay calm? She was the calmest woman on the street. She was just glad that she had remembered to put on her hat, her battered cloche. It’s known that flames make snacks of
straw.

The crowds were thickening, drawn by the smoke. Some men were trying to breach the line of police. They lived in houses close to the burning building. They knew that fire had legs and wings and
that their rooms and homes were next in line. They’d only come onto the street to see what all the fracas was and, when they knew, to find a certain place of safety for their families.
They’d found themselves expelled, pushed back from their front stairs, spectators to the colonizing heat.

‘Let’s fight the fire,’ they begged. ‘At least let us go home and save a thing or two, before it all goes up in smoke.’

‘Keep back,’ the policemen said.

Their commandant did not organize a chain of buckets or send for nurses from the sanatorium, or for the water pumps. He sent instead for mounted policemen and another van of men. This was his
district and he knew that trouble on the streets would be a black mark in his book.

It was not long before the word was out that the city councillor who’d recommended, just a week before, that tenements like these should be brought down to earth by fire had got his way.
How was it that the police were there, at dawn and in such numbers? Why was it that no one was allowed to investigate or to fight the fire? The police, the politicians, the nobs and profiteers who
wanted all the city to themselves had come before the sun was up to make a furnace for the poor. It was not only hotheads in the crowd who now found cobblestones and staves or started pushing
against the policemen’s chests. The neighbourhood – in both respects – was now inflamed. They’d beat themselves like moths against the cordon of the law to get nearer to the
flames.

If there was fighting to be done, then districts such as this were good for volunteers. Young men with little else to do got out of bed and ran into the street. Beggars, hawkers, prostitutes,
the unemployed, the young, the criminals, the men and women with grudges and with principles, in fact the sort who had scores to settle with the city and the police, were glad to add their lungs
and muscles to the throng. The crowds were driven from the rear by rumours and by the more mature of troublemakers who, hanging back, felt safe to bruise the air with threats and insults. Their
curses and their slogans, lobbed at the riot from the rear, caused punches, cobbles, bricks to be thrown at the front.

Riots are like fires. They look their best at night. They smoulder and they flare with greater drama when the sky is dark. They beckon and they mesmerize. This breakfast riot was short-lived.
The city had no need of it. It had its work to do, its schedules and appointments to address, its daylight hours to endure. Those men – and the few women – hurrying down the pavements
at that hour on their way to work had only time to poke their noses down the narrow lanes where they could see the police and smoke and hear the curses of the neighbourhood.

If this had been at dusk, not dawn, with all the duties of the day despatched, then only the most innocuous, the wariest, would pass the mayhem by. That’s something every beggar knows
– that breakfast times are dead, that crowds proliferate when work is done and time is no longer money. At dusk the riot would have spread out of the narrow lanes, beyond the burning
tenements. It would have helped itself to food and clothes through the broken glass of windows. It would have picked on men in carriages or cars and taken wallets, watches, hats, and paid for them
with beatings. It would have toppled tram-cars, and started new and spiteful fires in districts where the residents were rich. But it was dawn, and spite was still abed. The police soon gained
control with their horses and their truncheons and their farmdog expertise in splitting herds and cutting out the single troublemaker from the pack.

Five buildings burned. The Woodgate district lost its wooden gates. But only Em was killed. The tiles and timbers of the tenement fell all around her like the trees had fallen once across her
village lane, that other breakfast time when the winds had stretched the memory and bent the tallest, oldest pines beyond endurance. The sun fell onto the cobbles of the street for the first time
in who-knows-how-many? years. The fire-shortened tenements had cleared a path for it. It thinly penetrated smoke and waltzed like light on water as the wind gathered, turned and spread the ashy
air.

The crowd were now subdued. The ones whose homes were outside the police lines went home. The unlucky ones stayed put. And waited. They prayed the wind would settle down and let the fires die.
The residents of the five damaged buildings would be happy now to see the wind and flames whip up so that their grief could spread itself throughout the town, so everybody would know what it meant
to wake at dawn in purgatory, and without blame, and with no hope of heaven as reward. But there is no patterned justice to the wind or rain. And rain there was, quite soon. It made the timbers
steam. It dampened spirits. It cleared and cleaned the streets, so that the rivulets of rain which sped along the gutters took off the ash and dust which had so recently settled.

Em had been roasted and then dusted by the ash. The rain was her undertaker. It showered her. It made her cold and shiny almost, as ready as she could ever be for her discovery two hours later
by, at first, a pair of dogs and then a sergeant in the police. By noon they’d brought a box for her. It was not easy to lift her body from the rubble. She was too well cooked. Her flesh was
falling from the bone. They wrapped her in a blanket then and lifted her. They kept her in the city morgue, in ice, and out of sight. But no one came and so they gave her earthy eyelids in the
common grave and put her on the register as ‘Woman, unidentified’.

Aunt still was calm. She knew where she should rendezvous with Em. The marketplace, of course. Em’s place of work. Her pitch where she had sat with Victor on her breast, palm out and up
and heavy with coins.

‘You have to walk yourself,’ she said to Victor. ‘I’m not a donkey. Walk!’ She made him stand. She held his hand. ‘Come on. She’s waiting for us. Walk a
little way, and then I’ll let you have a ride.’

Victor was shocked. Not by the fire, and not by fears of losing Em. But by the clutter and the hardness of the streets, by the smoke and horses, by the anger and the weeping, by his aunt’s
strange mix of harshness and attention, her calmness and her urgency.

When he was eighty and looked back, it seemed to Victor that this was his first unfettered image of the town, that up till then he’d only glimpsed the city streets. At most he’d seen
those dislocated country views of fruit in carts, of vegetables displayed on stalls, of shoppers, traders, bar loafers, from the waists down. He did not like what he was seeing now. He clung to
Aunt’s hand and her skirts. His cheeks were wet. His chest was shaking, partly from the morning cold and partly from the bubble sobs which he could not suppress. He walked – a little
gawkily, of course. He was still young. He was not strong – and wished that he could be elsewhere. His head was full of countryside; the snoozer snake, the falling fruit, the little king
returning home in a carriage made for melons, the burning, lucky candle on the step, the birthday chair that’s legs were saplings, that’s back was green and woven like a wreath.

W
HEN
V
ICTOR WAS
an older, richer man, a twenty-six-year-old with property and prospects and – already – half a grip
on all the riches of the Soap Market, he found the time and sentiment to search the city archives for the bound and brittle volumes in which the local newspapers were preserved. He knew the year
and month that Em had disappeared. He knew there’d been a fire and still retained the snapshot memory of being lifted to Aunt’s back and watching flames and scarves of smoke across her
shoulder.

It was a morning’s work to find the thumbnail news item, amid reports of city trade and gossip and a world gone mad with war: ‘Five tenement houses frequented by itinerants,
prostitutes, and beggars were fired during dawn disturbances yesterday in the city’s Woodgate district. Several rioters were detained and charged with assault and theft following attacks on
police, fire officers, and local trading premises. The disturbances were initially occasioned, it is reported, by rivalry between criminal groups. The body of an unidentified woman was removed from
the debris.’ The single-column headline was
BREAKFAST ARSONISTS DETAINED
.

But at the time Victor had no apprehension that his mother might be harmed. His aunt had said, ‘Come on, she’s waiting for us.’ His only fear was that he would be obliged to
walk too far, before his aunt rewarded him with the donkey ride she’d promised on her back. He tugged her hand, so that his walking dragged on her. But she was tough and unlike Em. His tugs
earned harder tugs from her. Her grip on his small hand was only soft if he matched steps with her. The instant that he slowed or faltered she bunched his finger bones. ‘Keep up,’ she
said. Or, ‘Quickly now.’ He had to run to keep in step. Four trots of his to match her single stride. He’d rarely run before, except in play, and then the distance had been little
more than wall to wall in their small room. He hadn’t realized the urgency, the clumsiness of speed, or how painful it could be.

Who knows what ants or termites feel when boys or bounty hunters kill the queen? Their structures fall apart. The soft, iron magnet lets her fleshy filings go, so even those far from the nest
who have not witnessed the sacking of the royal chamber or seen the assassin’s needle impale the queen go listless-haywire at the instant of her death. Looking back, it seemed to Victor that
the world that day was a pandemonium of ants, and ants without a queen. How else could he make sense of city streets, or cars and trams and carriages, of random, indiscriminating sounds, of
pavement anti-patterns in which bodies flocked and fled like cream turned in a whisk, of Aunt once madly kind and now so rushed and unforgiving?